We are happy to announce that Accelerated Networking (AN) is generally available (GA) and widely available for Windows and the latest distributions of Linux providing up to 30Gbps in networking throughput, free of charge!

AN provides consistent ultra-low network latency via Azure’s in-house programmable hardware and technologies such as SR-IOV. By moving much of Azure’s software-defined networking stack off the CPUs and into FPGA-based SmartNICs, compute cycles are reclaimed by end user applications, putting less load on the VM, decreasing jitter and inconsistency in latency.

With the GA of AN, region limitations have been removed, making the feature widely available around the world. Supported VM series include D/DSv2, D/DSv3, E/ESv3, F/FS, FSv2, and Ms/Mms.

The deployment experience for AN has also been improved since public preview. Many of the latest Linux images available in the Azure Marketplace, including Ubuntu 16.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS 7.4 (distributed by Rogue Wave Software), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3, work out of the box with no further setup steps needed. Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2012R2 also work out of the box.